Stephen Green wipes the floor with perennial idiotarian Pat Buchanan. It’s reasonable to argue that the division of Europe at Yalta was a bad idea in retrospect – Stalin was a brutal dictator. At the same time, short of nuking Russia off the face of the map (assuming we could do such a thing), fighting the Soviet Union would have torn the nation apart, along with an already ravaged Europe.
The domination of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe by the Soviet empire was terrible. The alternatives were worse. Trying to play armchair quarterback to history can be an entertaining excercise, but Buchanan flirts dangerously close to an apologia for Naziism.
Despite the fact that an apologia for Nazism is begging for a whipping, I will give Hitler this- he had ten times more to do with our victory in the Cold War than Reagan, Walesa, and Wojtyla combined. If he hadn’t destroyed Stalin’s infrastructure and turned Eastern Europe into the meatgrinder of the Red Army, we’d be speaking Russian right now. (Conversely, if Stalin and Hitler hadn’t broken their pact, the combined might of America and the British Empire wouldn’t have stood a chance in the invasion of mainland Europe- and even if we had won, we would have sustained death tolls in the millions). Heck, in retrospect, the accomplishments of the Soviet Union, given their postwar devestation, wretched economics and even more wretched leadership, are amazing. Imagine if they hadn’t lost 10 million people and almost their entire industrial base in the war…
As for Yalta, we made a deal with the devil, and in retrospect, it was our only real option- and to apologize for it now borders on the silly. It’s realpolitik folks, get over it.